Thursday, April 30, 2015

Hallelujah,
I’m a Bum
(1933), released during the worst period of the Great Depression, is,
paradoxically, joyful and fearless. It
is not, however, a sample of those fantasy type films so prevalent during the
Depression meant to lift the nation’s spirits and take away our troubles; on
the contrary, it mocks and accuses and deals with the sin and hypocrisy of
wealth disparity with a sly grin and a sneer.

The movie is rife with risk
taking in terms of story and camera technique, and is so avant garde a piece
today’s viewers will ultimately scratch their heads in wonder. But it is not a movie to disparage, idolize,
or even analyze. It defies close
examination by virtue of its freewheeling and utterly unconcerned posture with
what we think.

Hallelujah,
I’m a Bum!
stars Al Jolson, and here is about the only area where the film does not take a
risk. He was a top star of vaudeville,
records, radio, and movies back in the day, and if we find his eye-rolling,
blackface shtick ridiculous or offensive, we must still credit the man with
enormous success and fame. But here,
there’s none of his usual manic overacting, no blackface, no shtick. He is a likeable leading man, and even a
romantic hero—who spurns our admiration with mocking even as he earns it.

Frank Morgan, who made a career
of elderly scamps plays—who’d have thought it—a leading man and handsome lover
with a mistress whom he drives to a suicide attempt with his paranoid
accusations of her unfaithfulness.

This is also a buddy picture, and
Jolson’s best pal is Edgar Connor, a diminutive fellow ex-vaudevillian, and
rare example of a black man being best pals with a white man.

Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart
wrote the tunes, and more. On several
occasions in this movie, the dialogue is spoken in a burst of rhyming
couplets. Rhyming couplets.

If these oddities weren’t enough,
there is the delightfully flippant manner in which the movie deals with the
crisis at hand: the Great Depression.

The bums, or hoboes, who occupy
Central Park in New York are a mob of unrepentant shirkers standing on the edge
of society and refusing to join the rat race.
They like their indolence, and some are outright thieves. Harry Langdon rebukes them for their laziness
and says everyone should work, but hates the prevailing capitalist society that
brands them as failures even more. He
calls a troop of mounted policemen converging on them “Hoover’s Cossacks.” He hates everybody, but works diligently as a
street cleaner, picking up trash, like Sisyphus rolling back the stone.

Society gets its knocks in this
film. Another scene shows the laying of
a cornerstone at a new public school, and the pompous officials being ragged by
the blasé construction workers perched on girders.

An assembly of schoolchildren close the ceremony
with “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” and as they sing, the camera, strobe-like,
flashes on their faces in close-up on each face to the beat of each phrase of
the song. These are not prettied up
Hollywood moppets; they’re regular scruffy kids with suspicious expressions at
the unfamiliar camera right in their faces.
It’s a fascinating and even disorienting look into our future—which our
children represent. Where is this
society taking us? Where are we taking
these kids? And it’s funny. There is no point made in this film, however
serious and thoughtful, that is not also funny.

We get a tracking shot of
business being done in the interior of a bank.
At the beginning, two wheeler-dealer types are discussing a transaction
of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Then the camera moves us along and two others speak of less money,
hundreds. Deals are made and agreed
upon. Money changes hands freely. By the time we get to the end of the shot, a
poor schmuck is standing at a teller window and asking to cash a check for
$5. The teller shakes his head. They don’t cash checks for that small amount.

Incidentally, both Rogers and
Hart get cameos in this movie. They’re
in a scene with Frank Morgan, who kisses babies like a good politician, and
they’re in the bank.

Frank Moran is the mayor of New
York, a rakish, somewhat corrupt official, but charming as heck, whose good
friend is Al Jolson, the “mayor” of Central Park. Their paths will crisscross throughout the
movie.

Mr. Morgan’s lady friend, played
by Madge Evans, attempts suicide by jumping off a bridge, but Al Jolson saves
her. She has suffered amnesia, and with
no ID on her (her missing wallet becomes an intricate part of the plot), Jolson
has no idea where she belongs. She is
helpless, and he becomes a romantic hero by finding her a room to stay in, and
by (gulp!) taking a job to support her.

It’s all very childlike, how he
brings her trinkets and takes her to the merry-go-round. She is an innocent, transformed from the hardened
mistress of a politico, and quite charming as she beams over Jolson’s
attentiveness to her. She begs him not
to leave her alone, because she is frightened. In a very warm, romantic scene, they watch from her window a dancehall across
the street. We see the neon sign in a
blur, and the figures of dancers in the lighted windows, and hear the music,
the lovely tune, “You Are Too Beautiful.”
Jolson takes her in his arms and dances with her, and sings the lyric. She melts into his embrace, her face truly
beatific in her happiness.

Morgan, meanwhile, is distraught
that she has gone missing, and begs Jolson to help him find her. Jolson discovers, heart breaking, that his
girl and Morgan’s are the same. Nobly,
he takes Morgan to her, and the shock of seeing him snaps her out of her
amnesia. At once, Jolson is a stranger
to her, and she begs Morgan not to leave her, with the same words she pleaded
with Jolson.

Al Jolson stands, framed by the
window, watching his happiness slip through is fingers, and we see the neon
sign from the dancehall across the street clearly, mockingly: “LOVELAND.”

He smiles only a very little,
with self-deprecating resignation, and with something else—a wish for this
woman to be happy. His moment of
stillness, for this usually frenetic performer, is a beautiful and most moving
piece of acting.

Our troubles are not forgotten in
this movie, let alone solved, but we share the burdens of others and somehow
that lightens the load for us. But we
have to be tough. You never know when
life is going to kick you in the teeth while you’re waiting for that bowl of
cherries.

At the end of this bitter decade,
Clark Gable famously shocked the nation by saying he didn’t “give a damn” in Gone with the Wind. Here, much earlier, those worst hit by hard
times say it in spades.

Thursday, April 23, 2015

First, Elisabeth of The Second Sentence blog, and Western story writer and devotee,
made the discovery that some of the horse stampede scenes from Red Canyon (1949), which we discussed here, were re-used in a 1964 episode called “The Black Stallion” of the TV show
The Virginian. I’m pasting her comments here:

It also features a
gorgeous black stallion with a white star on its forehead, and there are some
wonderful scenes of wild horse herds on the run—a lot of it stock footage cut
in, some of which I've seen in other episodes of the same show. When I was
watching it last night, there was a brief shot of the stallion escaping into a
red sandstone canyon, and something clicked in my head. The Virginian was a Universal show, and I know they re-used
footage (and even reworked scripts) from earlier Universal films sometimes.
Could a bit of footage from Red Canyon
have found its way into "The Black Stallion"? I guess I'll have to
wait until I can track down a copy of the movie to be sure…

The color of that video is very blurry and faded compared to the crisp DVDs,
where the red sandstone in that shot contrasts with the landscape in the rest
of the scene. That's what made me notice
it and think it might be stock footage.

Elisabeth
was spot-on. I took at look at the link
she provided, and these scenes are most definitely from Red Canyon. Great eye, and great detective work, Elisabeth.

***********************

The CMBA spring blogathon this year is going to be The Fabulous Films of the 1930s and
will run from April 27th through May 1st. Have a look here for the list of great blogs
participating and their offerings for this blogathon.

I’ll be tackling Hallelujah,
I’m a Bum! (1933) starring Al
Jolson, Edgar Connor, Madge Evans, and Frank Morgan, directed by Lewis
Milestone. It’s a real zeitgeist piece
of Great Depression hijinks about Central Park homeless (more fun than it
sounds), and my post will run next Thursday, April 30th.

***********************

My launch date for Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star.
is just two months away. Next week, on
Friday, May 1st, I hope to email out ARCs for reviewers of the book
(Advanced Reading Copies) in PDF form.
If anyone cares to review the book, please drop me an email so I can
send you one. More on the book in weeks to come.

Thursday, April 16, 2015

George Coulouris is a
sublime villain, supremely important to Watch
on the Rhine (1943), so charming in his lazy gentlemanliness, so pitiable in his bad
luck and bad moves, and so treacherous in his motives.

The character he plays,
a blasé Rumanian count, and a refugee from Europe and his own failed
enterprises, is one of playwright Lillian Hellman’s most simple, and yet most
brilliant creations. He is not a
blustering fascist—in this anti-Nazi drawing room drama that would stand out
like tacky décor, and besides, the bold and courageous resistance fighter Paul
Lukas plays is too clever to let himself get too near a real storm trooper-type. Coulouris is dangerous because he is not an
instigator, not a brainwashed (or brain dead) Nazi; he is on the second tier of
evildoers—an opportunist. As Lukas (and
Lillian Hellman) describes his ilk: “Some of them were, up to a point,
fastidious men. For these we may someday
have pity. They are lost men. Their spoils are small. Their day is gone.”

Watch on Rhine began as a tremendously successful Broadway
play. I discuss more about it in my
upcoming book on Ann Blyth, who had a minor role in that play as a child. The play’s producer and director, Herman
Shumlin, went to Hollywood to cast the adult roles because throughout the Great
Depression that’s where a lot of the best stage-trained actors went. He didn’t want Hollywood stars, necessarily,
he wanted stage veterans. In February 1941,
he came back with three heavy-hitters: Paul Lukas; Lucile Watson, who would
play the acerbic matriarch; and George Coulouris. Interestingly, he wanted Henry Daniell, but
Daniell wasn’t free (he appears in the film as Baron Von Ramme).

Before we get to the
film, we need to appreciate the overwhelming respect this play received when it
was produced in 1941-1942. I think in
the decades that followed the film lost its strength for a modern audience that
regards it as sentimental propaganda, a museum piece of a more gullible era. Sometimes one of our worst sins is our condescension about
the past. Add to this the changes in the
script that gave a larger role to Bette Davis—I’m afraid she tends to take too
much of the spotlight in her scenery-chewing.
But the original play hit the theatre world like a storm. The emotion of the day for the Broadway play
was genuine.

Here is one review:

I want to tell you that I believe the finest, most deeply moving play
that has been written in America in years is at Ford’s Theater this week…I say
it because it is each man’s high duty to inform his fellow-men when he finds,
or thinks he finds, something very true, very beautiful, very important.

Watch on the Rhine is all these things to me. And it was obvious when the curtain fell on
the opening performance that it had these qualities to many others, too.

There was the testimony of the applause which continued until the
desperate theater manager turned on the bright house lights. There was the testimony of many tear-filled
eyes…With humor and with tenderness, with logic and with occasional poetry,
Lillian Hellman has written this play.
And Herman Shumlin has produced it not as a theatrical businessman
presents plays. He has staged it, quite
obviously, with love and with great reverence…I do not like to use the word
‘great,’ particularly about a play whose theme is so close to the headlines
that our viewpoint may unconsciously be distorted. Only years can tell that.

But certainly it casts a spell which, for a time at least, transforms a
theater into a rare and holy place where the heart is touched, elated, ennobled.
– Louis Azrael, Baltimore News-Post.

In an unusual move,
Warner Bros., in securing the rights to the play, allowed Herman Shumlin to
direct (this was his first movie, and he made only one other); and allowed Paul
Lukas, George Coulouris, Lucile Watson, as well as Frank Wilson, who played the
butler, to come with Shumlin as part of the deal. Paul Lukas would win an Academy Award for his
performance, and Lucile Watson was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

George Coulouris,
originally from the U.K., had a Shakespearean background, and then met up with
Orson Welles’ troupe and began a long and very distinguished career in film,
stage, TV, radio alternating between noble characters and villains. That he was adept at both says a lot for how
he plays his character in Watch on the
Rhine. We understand him, and can
even sympathize as we despise him.

The intelligent script
by Hellman gives all the characters a great forum, and this is what makes
a great script. No character is wasted,
they are all necessary and everything they say matters.

We meet Coulouris
coming down to breakfast on the terrace of Lucile Watson’s palatial family home
outside Washington, D.C. He is married
to Geraldine Fitzgerald, and we see their marriage is rocky. He snipes at her, accuses her of being too
fond of Donald Woods, the son of the house.
In a moment, he greets his hostess Lucile Watson with old-world European
charm, and we settle in to the intriguing world of a professional houseguest in
the home of a rich patron.

Later, he goes to the
German Embassy for an evening gala and a late-night card came. This scene was written by Dashiell Hammett,
to whom Hellman handed off the screenplay chore as she was busy with another commitment. I like Hammett’s additions for the most part,
he opens the story up to all of Washington.
However, some of the strength and verve of the stage play is also
watered down in the process, which is a shame.
I suppose it’s a tricky line to walk.

Here at the card game,
like a player showing his hand of cards, we are shown the various “face cards”
in the arena of fascist villains: Blecher, a cold, sneering bully, referred to
as a butcher, who runs the game and the show.
He is the head bad guy to whom his agents report. He is shrewd and ruthless. Ironically, this ultra Nazi swine is played
by Kurt Katch, born an Eastern European Jew and a veteran of the Yiddish
theatre. He comments on the others and
introduces them to us: Baron Von Ramme, played by Henry Daniell is “contemptuous
of us, but chiefly because we are not gentlemen. Would be satisfied enough doing the same
things or worse under some stupid Hohenzollern.”

Then there is the
money-grubbing publisher of the American Nazi newspaper, and Chandler, the
American oil man who wants to sell to the Axis; the mysterious Oberdorff,
played silently by Rudolph Anders who seems the most evil simply because we,
and Blecher, know nothing about him. He
is a question mark.

Then Blecher comes to
Coulouris, whom he dismisses as a man who sells things “but at the moment you
have nothing to sell.”

He will soon, when Paul
Lukas and his family show up, and he suspects from the moment he meets Lukas
that here is a man the Nazis would like to get their hands on. With very little prospects and at the end of
the road, it is inevitable that a man like Coulouris will want to sell Lukas to
the Nazis, but how we get to that point is intriguing.

In some scenes between
them, even though the room is full of other characters, it seems as if we are
watching a two-man play. They spar and take each other’s measure carefully in
polite conversation. Lukas, fresh from a
daring escape and having been wounded in a previous mission, is the more emotionally
brittle. Coulouris comes off as suave,
with the panache of a former diplomat who has learned early not to commit
himself, who deals with life with a shrug of his shoulders, a man in evening
dress with no neck to stick out.

His behavior is privately
more unstable with his wife, alternately pleading and threatening her, but to
the others, he maintains his British Public School manners and his Continental
charm. He is good at bridge, knows the
right things to say. He is apolitical,
out for himself, but he feels more distaste for freedom fighters than for
fascists because he understands the latter.
But he comes to admire Paul Lukas, if not for his political stance, then
for his resiliency. After the scene
where he blackmails Lukas in return for not turning him over to the Nazis, Coulouris
remarks after Lucile Watson and Donald Woods have left the room:

“The New World has left
the room. I feel less discomfort with
you. We are Europeans, born to trouble
and understanding…They’re young. The
world has gone well for most of them.
For us, we’re like peasants…work, trouble, ruin. But no need to call curses on the frost. There it is.
There it will be again, always, for us.”

But he is no peasant
and has never worked hard at anything.
It is only in his imagination that he identifies with the sorrows of
European peasantry. In a sense, he does
have a master, too: the Nazis that have taken over all Europe.

In his final scene, we
finally see his fear and panic as Paul Lukas, who despite his ill health is
still a man of action, points a gun in Coulouris’ face and angrily tells him, “There
is no substance to you.” He both
accuses, and mourns for Coulouris, because the blasé count, though he is
frightened about dying now, he will have forgotten all about it in the morning if Lukas lets
him get away.

We know this is true,
because George Coulouris, for all his benign charm, the salon and sidewalk café
façade, has shown us his empty heart from the beginning. We can’t write him off as just another bad
guy. He could be our houseguest, a
friend or relative who could stab us in the back to save himself. As Bette Davis says, “We have seen them in so
many living rooms.”

My book on Ann Blyth's
career—Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. will be
published on June 18th. I’d like to
invite any blogger—film blogger or book blogger—to participate in a blog tour.
I’ll be looking for blogs to schedule publicity-oriented posts beginning
Monday, June 1st. The last day will be June 17th. If anyone wants to pick a
day, please let me know so I can coordinate with others. Think of it as a kind
of blogathon. On your day, you can post a review of the book (I’ll have ARCs –
advanced reading copies - available in PDF form which I’ll email to you that
you can read on your computer), or you can do a Q&A with me, or I can just
send you a 250-word excerpt of the book, or you can just post the cover and a
link to the Amazon page, if you will. Just a little something to spread the
word. I will be posting here every day from June 1st through the 18th and I’ll
be linking to your blogs, pushing traffic to you.

Among those 17 bloggers who participate, I’ll throw your names in a hat and
pick five winners who will receive a print book of Ann Blyth: Actress.
Singer. Star. when it is published on the 18th. The rest will receive an eBook file in
whichever format you choose: ePub, Mobi, or PDF (Note, the ARC copies will not
have the index).

Thursday, April 9, 2015

Referring to a grade school photo
of herself, Anne Frank wrote in her diary October 10, 1942:

“This is a photograph of me as I
wish I looked all the time. Then I might
still have a chance of getting to Hollywood. But now I am afraid I usually look quite
different.”

“Hollywood” –the idea of it, more
than the place, was the phenomenon of the twentieth century that crossed all
boundaries of society—class, age, gender, nationality. A 13-year-old girl in hiding from the Nazis
in Holland collected Hollywood movie star photos, and compared her own childish
image to the touched up masterpieces of the Hollywood studio photographers.

At that same time, in October
1942, 14-year-old Ann Blyth was touring in the anti-Nazi play Watch on the Rhine and had just been
discovered by representatives of Universal Studios when the play came to Los
Angeles. Her stardom was in the near
future, and it would be supported by luminous portrait photos that the studio
distributed to fans.

Mr. Jones was a master of the
then prevalent technique of using light to “sculpt” the image of the star. The photos, which make these familiar stars
look something like gods and goddesses, were, of course, touched up in the
production process, but even before the film was shot the stars were
dramatically posed, glamorized within a universe of lights, while Jones chatted
to them to calm them while he made them immortal on huge 8 x 10 negatives. The process by which he worked is described
in my book, and you can learn more about his art in the interesting book: Light and Illusion – The Hollywood Portraitsof Ray Jones by Tom Zimmerman.

It was most gratifying for author
Zimmerman, and the editor of the book, John Jones, son of the photographer, to learn
that among the Hollywood star photos Anne Frank collected and pasted on the
wall of her hiding place was a photo of a trio of Universal stars together: Robert Stack,
Deanna Durbin and Franchot Tone. The
photo was taken by Ray Jones. It’s still
there. You can see it if you visit the
Anne Frank House & Museum.

**********************

Come back next Thursday when we
join in The Great Villain Blogathon hosted by those evil villains at Speakeasy,
Shadows & Satin, and Silver Screenings blogs. My contribution will be a look at George
Coulouris in Watch on the Rhine
(1943).

Thursday, April 2, 2015

Dead
Reckoning
(1947) is Easter noir. The incongruity
of Easter and noir melded together might be why the movie has such an offbeat,
almost comic touch to it, more than one usually sees in noir, which is usually
humorless. Noir is despair, it’s fate
clutching at the throat, dragging down an already doomed soul into depths of
accepting that life is hopeless. It’s
more than just shadows from window blinds; there’s a psychological reason for
the shadows.

Easter noir?

Yeah, it can be done, and Dead Reckoning does it, bold as brass
and a little cheeky.

Since the story is a mystery,
I’ll try not to spell it all out, but just hit the high spots with a few
observations.

There’s the image of an Easter
lily and a Medal of Honor on the title credit, but Easter is not thrown right
at us like Judy and Fred in their Easter bonnets strolling down Fifth
Avenue. It’s only hinted at, and we have
to connect the dots. The action starts
with Bogart darting through darkened, rain-soaked streets, obviously on the lam,
and as he stops by a florist’s shop to mix with a small crowd observing the
display of lilies, a newsstand guy’s voice hollers for us to get our Sunday
paper. Then Bogie ducks into a Roman
Catholic church before early Mass. It’s
Easter Sunday, but we won’t know that until the inevitable noir flashback
plunks us a few days earlier when he registers in a hotel on April 17th,
and remarks in a later scene when interrogated by cops inspecting his room that
if they’re looking for Easter bunnies, it’s a day early. (Easter fell on the 21st in 1946.) His flippant remark is the only time Easter
is mentioned.

But these touches are only
add-ons; the real Easter reference is in the flirtation with an afterlife, if
not exactly resurrection, with a few poetic symbols of parachutes for a soft
landing into whatever awaits.

Parachutes, silken, billowing,
harrowing are the image and emblem of the film, more than the lilies and the
Medal. Bogart returns from the war, a
captain in the paratroops, getting the VIP treatment with his pal and sergeant,
played by William Prince. Prince did not
have a long film career, but did TV work for decades, including many soap
operas. He’s a handsome, likeable guy,
with enough personality to hold his own with Bogart, which is impressive. His role is short in this movie, but he makes
such a strong impression I’m surprised it didn’t launch him on a longer film
career.

Bogart used to own a fleet of
taxicabs in St. Louis—love his line that they got sunk at Pearl Harbor—and the
young sarge was a college professor, but the working class officer and the
enlisted man professor, as well as their close friendship despite a rule
against fraternization, is only one of many instances of flaunting the norms
we’re supposed to expect. Perhaps the
biggest one occurs at the end when Bogart won’t stand by his new dame, Lizabeth
Scott because, though he loves her, he says of Prince, “I loved him more.” Sidekicks are not pushed aside for women in
this movie, especially when she’s nobody he can trust. His sidekick is not a comic foil, but a man
to put on a pedestal even at the price of his own life.

From John, Chapter 15: Greater love than this no man hath, that a
man lay down his life for his friends.

Okay, so this is from the
Douay-Rheims, but Bogie did stumble into a Catholic
church, after all.

He and his sergeant are bound for
a special appointment in Washington, D.C., because he recommended Prince for
the Medal of Honor. (One note here, it’s
commonly known as the Congressional Medal of Honor, but that’s not really its
official title. It’s the Medal of Honor,
and even if the Hollywood screenwriters didn’t know that, Bogart and the
military brass escorting them to D.C., should have. Calling it "the Congressional" is just wrong.)

But sarge jumps off the train and
runs away and leaves Bogie with a mystery.
Sarge has something to hide, and Bogie spends the rest of the movie
figuring out what it is. Bogie gets
drugged, beaten up, but nothing deters him from finding out the truth, and the
search takes him to a newspaper morgue (one of my favorite places for
research), a real morgue (I’ll pass), and a streamline moderne nightclub where
he meets noir queen Lizabeth Scott, “Cinderella with a husky voice,” as he
says.

She’s in Gulf City, a steamy burg
in the South where he has trailed his buddy.
(Funny that while pausing in Philadelphia, he talks on the phone in his
hotel room and we see Independence Hall out the window. Must be like if you get a room in Paris, you
always see the Eiffel Tower.)

Morris Carnovsky is the club
owner, who’s got Lizabeth Scott, and everybody, under his thumb. He plays the erudite mobster with the
pretense of culture wonderfully.
Unfortunately, Mr. Carnovsky would have his film career cut off at the
knees by the Blacklist in 1950, but Broadway became for him, like so many other
actors and writers, a refuge in those dark, disgusting days.

Charles Cane plays a detective,
sarcastic and perhaps not so bright, who spends the movie tailing Bogie, and
even being held hostage by Ruby Dandridge, Lizabeth Scott’s African American
maid when Miss Dandridge is told to hold the gun on the cop tied up in the
closet so Scott and Bogie can escape.
Black woman gets to hold a gun on a white cop—even if it’s through a
door and meant to be comic, it’s still a bold stunt.

Marvin Miller plays Carnovsky’s
hired goon, a cruel gorilla in a white dinner jacket. We last saw Mr. Miller playing Genghis Khan
here in The Golden Horde (1951). Casting directors evidently never saw him as
the cuddly type.

Our old, dear friend Wallace Ford
is an ex-safe cracker who provides Bogie with some helpful gadgets, and it’s a
pleasure to see him in any movie. Got to
write a post about him sometime.

Lest we forget:

For a guy on a chase with no time
to lose, Bogart changes from uniform to civilian clothes and a Fedora mighty
quickly. Though he and his sergeant
briefly bask on the train about houses with roofs, kids who can eat, and all
the pleasures of peace in a country not destroyed by war, there is no sense of
homecoming to the U.S., no period of adjustment. This is not The Best Years of Our Lives.

Blink and you miss ‘em: Ray Teal
as the motorcycle cop, partygoer Bess Flowers in the nightclub, and according
to IMDb, Matthew “Stymie” Beard, too grown for Our Gang, as the bellhop who
brings Bogie’s prank note to the detective tailing him.

Bogie kills time by practice pitching into
a chair in his hotel room, and being from St. Louis, ruminates on pitching in
the World Series and downing the Red Sox for his team, the Cardinals. The Cardinals, did, indeed, win over the Sox
in October of ’46, but the movie takes place in April, so it’s as if Bogie
is predicting what will happen. As a Red
Sox fan, I must admit the pain this caused, since the Sox had not won the
Series since 1918. However, in the spirit
of good sportsmanship, let me offer my belated congratulations to the St. Louis
Cardinals. Well done.

The Cardinals also beat the Red
Sox in the 1967 World Series, which I’m afraid we still haven’t quite gotten
over yet.

Oh, all right. Congratulations on that one too.

Bogart is not his usual grim
anti-hero in this one; he doesn’t play it with the bitterness and dissatisfaction
of his returning vet in Key Largo, or
Rick in Casablanca. His quips are less sarcastic than they are
simply funny. He’s got some great lines
in this movie, and his character is less haunted than his other roles.

He plays well with Lizabeth
Scott. She had a really fine way of
appearing both vulnerable and yet as inscrutable as noir dames were supposed to
be, so that we don’t know whose side she’s on.
Unfortunately, her singing is dubbed in this movie, and I’m not sure
why, as she was certainly able to sing.
She had a limited range, but it was a pleasant singing voice, very
suitable to jazz and blues numbers. Here’s her album on YouTube.

For all the gloss of her
glamorized scenes in the nightclub, I really think one of the most beautiful
shots of Lizabeth Scott is at the end when she’s sitting in the car with Bogie,
her hair stringy from the rain. The
camera view is from the back seat as she turns sharply to Bogie, her eyes
bright and intense, and her expression taut, fire in her soul and murder in her
heart. I don’t have a screen cap of it,
but here’s a publicity shot with a similar appearance:

Bogart tells his troubles to a
Catholic priest in church at the beginning of the movie, jump starting the
flashback.The priest, played by James
Bell, is in uniform.He, like, Bogie, is
just returned from overseas and is also a paratrooper, so Bogart feels a
kinship with him.Bogie hides in the
shadows as one making Confession.At the
end of the movie, Father will return, softly intoning a Latin prayer for the
dying, and one last image of a billowing parachute in the blackness is seen,
carrying the weird juxtaposed themes of afterlife, parachuting, guilt and
punishment, but oddly without of any suggestion of redemption, which would be
all we need to tie up the Easter message.But this is where the noir finally kicks in: there is no redemption,
just settling scores.

May I wish all who celebrate, a Happy Easter. If you like noir, remember, jelly beans also come in black.

Bob the Bear - a picture book by my twin brother & Me

Read Arte Acher's Falling Circus

Recent Comments on Past Posts:

It Happened to Jane is special to my family. My mother was selected to play the wife of Aaron Caldwell, the Chester town selectman in the movie and has a speaking part about the parking meter revenues gathered from outside his general store in the town center. My older brother was one of the cub scouts delivering coal donated by town residents to fuel Old 97. We grew up in Deep River. A few years ago a niece provided every member of music family copies of It Happened to Jane on DVD. The Connecticut River valley was truly an idyllic spot for growing up in the mid-Twentieth Century!

Thank you, the Lux Theatre broadcast was absolutely marvelous, and far superior, as you have indicated, the film. I have always admired Dorothy McGuire, and she has it all over Jean Peters. This is not as clear cut a differential between Joseph Cotton and Dan Dailey, but at this point in their grand careers, I will take Dan. Again thank you.

I jus watched this and I have to agree... the ending let me down. She left Howard Keel!!!! I've had a crush on him since seeing Seven Brides when I was 10.I did love the message that Rose Marie can be herself.But I'm still sad. Seriously, Rose Marie, you chose the wrong man.

My wife and I go back two decades for our love of “Remember the Night” and its heartwarming story...P.S. As I type these words I am reminded of the inscription my wife had engraved inside the wedding ring I now wear… “Remember The Night.”

Beautiful piece, Jacqueline, about yet another movie from the Unjustly Forgotten file. I agree a video release is decades overdue, (What is wrong with Universal Home Video? You'd think the only movies they ever made were monsters and Abbott & Costello. And don't even get me started on the pre-'48 Paramounts they're sitting on.) I count myself lucky to have scored a decent 16mm print on eBay some years back; otherwise it would have been a good 40 years since I saw it.

I happened upon this piece and wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed reading it. Really a great appreciation of a wonderful movie. Raoul Walsh is one of my favorite directors and this is the first of his movies I ever remember seeing--it was on the big screen back in 1952 so I guess that dates me but a movie like this was ideal for my age, both for the adventure and romance.

I guess I'm going to be busy reading all your blogs that touch on events I'm familiar with.

Judgement At Nuremberg caught my attention as I had the privilege of working in it for some 60 days. But more so as the German WWII history always recall my own trials during the war.

I suppose we filmed this around 1959-1960 which is not that long after the ending of the war. Reconstruction in Europe was far from accomplished. For the audience in 1961 this history was still a part of everyone's life.

I was overwhelmed sitting in that set and listening to the greatest actors of that generation orate day after day... an endless live theater.